Lani Wu is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, School of Pharmacy at University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Wu has come to biology by way of pure mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering. Dr. Wu obtained an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the National Taiwan University and her Ph.D. under Dr. Richard Hamilton at the University of California at San Diego. Dr. Wu worked at the intersection of differential geometry, topology, and nonlinear partial differential equations. Dr. Wu left the mathematics faculty at Princeton University to join the fledgling research division at Microsoft, where they founded a number of research efforts, including projects in video compression, semantic search, and speech/noise separation from multi-microphone input. Prior to arriving at UCSF, Dr. Wu were at Rosetta Informatics, the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard University, and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. In her lab, Dr. Wu makes use of experiment, quantitative data analysis, modeling, and theory to investigate design principles of biological networks in normal and diseased tissues.